East-Meg Two
East-Meg Two is a Soviet Russian megacity wrapped around Lake Baikal.Wetworks by Dave Stone It is the central power of the Sov Block and a rival to both Mega-City One and the Sino Block. History By 2070, the communist states had formed the Union of Soviet Mega-Cities. At the dawn of the Atomic War, they were one of the loudest foreign voices ordering the US to stand down.Origins As a result, the subcontinent was bombarded in the Atomic Wars and East-Meg Two was one of the few survivors, facing mutations, diseases, and the Sino-Sov-Megacity WarsMegazine 2.31: "Armitage" in the remaining 2070s. While allied to East Meg One, they had separate governments and agendas - by 2101, East-Meg Two was interested in glasnost with Mega-City One while its sister-city was planning open warfare. Both sent their top assassins, Orlok (EM-1) and the Black Widower (EM-2), to Oz on the same mission in 2101, unaware of the other. Orlok quietly killed the Widower.Orlok: The Rasputin Caper At some point before the Apocalypse War, East-Meg Two had a Neo-Perestroika explosion of insane hyper-capitalism: much of it out of the reach of the average worker. This credit-driven frenzy and obsession with (outdated) Western cultur was panicked, an attempt to mask the reality of its situation as a giant, impoverished refugee camp. After a few years, the movement collapsed. Wetworks by Dave Stone, referring to the miserablw aftermath as a "state of affairs that had persisted until well after the Apocalypse War" Their economy decayed and died. Prog 1943 Long queues for basic food were the norm, with black marketeers selling basic Mega-City One junk food."A Typical Saturday afternoon in East-Meg Two", Judge Dredd Mega-Special 1991 When the Apocalypse War broke out in 2104, East-Meg Two stayed out but the threat it might join in was used by EM-1 to keep out Mega-City Two and Texas City. After the war, the survivors of EM-1 headed to the second city. With the tacit approval of East-Meg Two, various survivors would attempt revenge attacks against Mega-City One. This changed in 2112, under Supreme Judge Josef Traktorfactori; a new spirit of glasnost broke out and Orlock & his followers were denounced as terrorists.Shamballa The Sov-Block and Mega-City One began to team up against mutual threats such as the Deros, Judgement Day, and the Face of Mars. In 2113, Traktorfactori and Chief Judge McGruder had direct talks about restricting Sino-Cit expansion into deep space.A Clockwork Pineapple There were also goodwill exchanges of citizens that gave MC-1 a large minority of Sov and Sov-descended citizens, and the Sovs joined the Global Lunar Partnership and sent Judges to Luna City One. Unknown to the Block, Mega-City One also had a mole in the East-Meg Two Diktatorat''Meet Jonny Kiss'' Glasnost ended abruptly in 2115 when Jonny Kis whacked Traktorfactori. In the mid-2120s, the Sov Block was resurgent. It cracked down on separatists in its remote areas (who the Sinos backed as deniable proxies) In 2125, Sov forces invaded anarchic Mongolia and engaged in the Mongolian Clearances; over half a million people died in the storming of Ulan Bator.Megazine 247 The following year, the Block used deniable assets to destabilise Luna-1 so they could send military forces to 'assist' and take control of the colony. Judge Dredd thwarted this.Eclipse novel by James Swallow The clone Anatoli Grigorivich Kazan was allowed to use 'forgotten' MC-1 prisoners to draw Mega-City Judges into a trap, sparking a shooting match between the two Judge forces; and after that, use Sov spies and assassins to target Dredd through his niece Vienna. That last attempt spooked the Secretariat. Fearing Kazan was pursuing a private vendetta that could start a war, they tried to have him executed. He fled to Mega-City One custody and informed them that the Sovs were secretly backing a coup attempt in wartorn Ciudad Barranquilla. Mega-City One prevented this coup at the eleventh hour in 2128 by decapitating Judge Supremo Sangrenegra themselves and convincing Judge Cholo to be their man instead of the Sovs. The Block complained to the global community, trying to present Mega-City One as the only aggressor.Megazine #246-9: "Regime Change" The separatist war was won near the Mongolian border, only for the authorities to lose interest. By 2133 the locals were ignored and left at the mercy of bandits and rad-pirates. One pirate group, the Red Sky Commandos, was wiped out by the Samizdat Squad.Samizdat Squad: Red Skies The presence of the Squad itself was of more interest and the anti-dissident Omon Division later attempted, and failed, to slay them. The horrors of Chaos Day, caused by Sov terrorists, led to East-Meg Two offering food aid to the stricken Mega-City One. As part the deal, MC-1 was going to deport its Sov citizens (who were now in interment camps for their own safety) back to the Block but Dredd proposed a compromise deal: sending them to a reclaimed "Sovsec" in former Mega-City Two. East-Meg was unhappy but allowed it. When the ex-Judge convict colony Enceladus was on the verge of collapse in 2137, Aimee Nixon surrendered it to East-Meg Two. A Sov force arrived to take control of the moon and, once there, slew many of the inhabitants before being destroyed.Prog 1927-28, during the Enceladus story In the process, Sov forces had captured the former MC-1 Chief Judge Martin Sinfield and hoped to gain intelligence from him. A deniable MC-1 force raided the Sov bunker holding Sinfield in 2138 and retrieved him, as well as killing Sov Judges in deliberate retaliation for the Enceladus massacre.Get Sin, progs 2001-3 In 2139, the Miska ore processing plant in northern Siberia was attacked by a criminal force. Due to intense and contradictory bureaucracy in East-Meg Two's judiciary, a Judge squad wasn't sent to deal with it for a week - by which point a Mega-City One team had got there first. (One Sov Judge, acting without orders, planted a bomb on the MC-1 H-wagon so it would be stranded)Black Snow, 2055-60 In the possible 2170s shown in Red Razors, the Sovs of East-Meg Two - renamed Sov-Block 2 have gone hyper-capitalist and worshipped American cultural icons like Elvis as if he was Jovus; the aging communist terror group the OAP-KGB fought back with bombing campaigns. Convicts like Red Razors were brainwashed into being Judges and genetic engineering led to talking horses. The Chief Judge was Ricky, a rich thirteen-year-old who'd bought the former East-Meg Two,until he was murdered by the OAP-KGB. The new Chief Judge Yeltsin offered the neurosurgery process that created Razors to foreign megacities in 2176. In return, he wanted Mega-City One's ultimate weapon, Armageddon X (a cryogenically frozen Dredd). Razor's programming was damaged and he ran riot, spreading death and chaos throughout Sov-Block Two until Dredd was released and executed him.The Hunt for Red Razors Government and Judges Nominally, the Sov-Block is run on communist lines and it condemns the western megacities as decadent imperialists. In practice, the Sov-Block is often more oppressive than Mega-City One. As with all the major powers, government, law, and military is run by the local Judges. All of the Sov-Block has the same judicial uniform and equipment. The ruling body is the Diktatorat, also called the Direktorat. Also mentioned is the Secretariat. Military forces include the robot Sentenoids, the Nu-Spetznaz, and a conventional military force; Judges are also used. The Omon Division are an elite military force that wipe out internal dissidents.Megazine 324 Psi-Judges are called PsiKops. Shamballa The city artificially creates some of its psis out of already loyal Judges.Wetworks References